James Fallows: The OPR Report is this Era's 'Hiroshima'
[James Fallows is National Correspondent for The Atlantic.]
...Through American history, there have been episodes of brutality and abuse that, in hindsight, span a very wide range of moral acceptability. There is no way to "understand" lynchings that makes them other than abominations. But -- to use the extreme case -- America's use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be the subject of first-order moral debate, about whether any "larger good" (forcing an end to the war) could justify the immediate suffering, the decades-long aftereffects, and the crossing of the "first use" frontier that this decision represented.
My point now is not to go through the A-bomb debate. It is to say that anyone who is serious in endorsing the A-bomb decision has to have fully faced the consequences. This is why John Hersey's Hiroshima was requisite basic knowledge for anyone arguing for or against the use of the bomb. The [Office of Professional Responsibility] report [on torture] is essentially this era's Hiroshima. As Hersey's book does, it makes us confront what was done in our name -- "our" meaning the citizens of the United States....
The "torture years" are now an indelible part of our history. The names Bybee and Yoo will always be associated with these policies. Whether you view them as patriots willing to do the dirty work of defending the nation -- the Dick Cheney view, the 24 view, which equates the torture memos with Abraham Lincoln's imposition of martial law -- or view them as damaging America's moral standing in ways that will take years to repair (my view), you owe it to yourself to read these original documents. I tried to make this point in more halting real-time fashion yesterday in a talk with Guy Raz on NPR.
Read entire article at The Atlantic
...Through American history, there have been episodes of brutality and abuse that, in hindsight, span a very wide range of moral acceptability. There is no way to "understand" lynchings that makes them other than abominations. But -- to use the extreme case -- America's use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be the subject of first-order moral debate, about whether any "larger good" (forcing an end to the war) could justify the immediate suffering, the decades-long aftereffects, and the crossing of the "first use" frontier that this decision represented.
My point now is not to go through the A-bomb debate. It is to say that anyone who is serious in endorsing the A-bomb decision has to have fully faced the consequences. This is why John Hersey's Hiroshima was requisite basic knowledge for anyone arguing for or against the use of the bomb. The [Office of Professional Responsibility] report [on torture] is essentially this era's Hiroshima. As Hersey's book does, it makes us confront what was done in our name -- "our" meaning the citizens of the United States....
The "torture years" are now an indelible part of our history. The names Bybee and Yoo will always be associated with these policies. Whether you view them as patriots willing to do the dirty work of defending the nation -- the Dick Cheney view, the 24 view, which equates the torture memos with Abraham Lincoln's imposition of martial law -- or view them as damaging America's moral standing in ways that will take years to repair (my view), you owe it to yourself to read these original documents. I tried to make this point in more halting real-time fashion yesterday in a talk with Guy Raz on NPR.